Rhena Writes

Tag: writing

  • Rhena, more than this poem.

    Daily writing prompt
    If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
    View all responses

    Rhena, human being being human.

    Rhena, no-one’s burden, no one’s savior.

    Rhena, good to the last drop.

    Rhena, me, myself, and I.

    Just Rhena it.

    Rhena, returning to myself.

    Rhena, creator, survivor, learner, lucid dreamer.

    Rhena, Queen.

    Rhena never goes out of style.

    Rhena, minding my own business.

    Have it the Rhena way.

    Rhena, I am here, like a good Rhena.

    Rhena, being strange.

    The slowest picker upper, Rhena.

    A Rhena is forever.

    Think Rhena.

    Rhena is it.

    The Rhena-est place on Earth.

    Because Rhena is worth it.

    Rhena gives me wings.

    Rhena, I’m doing my very best.

    The ultimate Rhena machine.

    I’m in Rhena’s hands.

    Rhena runs on Rhena.

    The best a Rhena can get.

    Rhena, I can hear me now.

    Rhena, always suffering.

    Rhena, believer.

    Rhena, more than a tag line.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Good is God (all the time) and YHWH is breath.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
    View all responses

    A good life is a series of good moments, one after the other, strung together like pearls on a necklace. What makes a moment “good”?

    Being present to myself is a decent starting place to a good moment.

    Is it only good moments that are worthy of a spot on this necklace of life? Or, when I look back on each moment, will some shimmer more brightly than others? Can I consider the dull and tarnished moments as “good” as the others? Yes, I can.

    Because in all of those moments — even the dull, mistake-riddled ones — I was myself.

    Being present to this moment, to myself in this moment, means not looking back at the previous moments with self judgement — not weighing out and judging one as being “good” and another as being “bad.” Those moments existed. And I existed in those moments. That is enough.

    I this moment, I am sitting at my computer, attempting to answer this question. When my mind wanders off in flights of fancy, I pull it back to my breath.

    My breath is always with me. As long as I’m alive. And so I can always return to it. A good breath is any breath at all because it means that I’m alive. A breath is a moment. And a breath is the sound YHWH, which means that “I am” is on every breath. And that means that God is on every breath. And God and good are really the same words. And all breaths are good and therefore all moments are good moments. And a good life is just a series of good moments strung together like pearls on a necklace. And so it is that this is a good life. And so it is that the breath is the most important thing needed to live a good life. Breathe.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • No. I do not remember my favorite childhood book.

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
    View all responses

    I do remember reading books. And I do remember specific books. I do remember the smooth crisp pages of, for example, Goodnight Moon. I remember sitting on the edge of the bathtub within a hand’s reach of a roll of toilet paper as I cried through certain pages of Where the Red Fern Grows (if you know, you know). And it was at a rental beach house where I similarly cried over Bridge to Terabethia. I can remember the school librarian’s particular way of turning the pages on picture books and the resonance in my dad’s chest as he read to me on the green chair in the living room. I know that it was The Trumpet of the Swan that one of my grade school teachers was reading to us when we got to go outside to listen to the story on one of the first suitable days of spring. But, for the love of me, I cannot remember the plot of the book at all. I know that I pictured the bathroom in the house I grew up in next to in the part of Stuart Little when Stuart retrieves his mother’s wedding ring.

    I’m fairly certain that it was reading Stuart Little that set me off on reading The Rescuers and The Borrowers. There’s just something about tiny creatures repurposing small household items for their own purposes. I’m sure it was that particular appeal of tiny objects that made The Toy Shop Mystery and The Doll House Mystery also enchanting.

    Apparently, EB White was quite popular because I definitely remember reading Charlotte’s Web. Although I think that I really only remember the details of the plot now because I’ve read it aloud to my children as an adult.

    But I don’t remember one in particular book as my favorite. It’s all just as well. It’s the way I truly do not have a favorite child.

    As is made apparent in yesterday’s blog post, (which was in response to the prompt to name three books which had an impact on me) I’m more widely read now that I’m an adult.

    Over the past week, I also wrote about jobs that I’ve had (Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?) and how I unplug (from said jobs or from the internet?).

    The other three posts from this past week are quite short, but writing them spurred some breakthroughs for me about myself, life, mental health, and how to think about certain struggles.

    The first makes the case for centering myself, loving myself, and being my own best friend.

    The second is about the joy that arises when I trust my future self.

    Lastly, I thought about fear which, as an anxious person, is quite a feat in and of itself. But in the writing, I discovered a personal hack for cutting fear off at the knees in Starve Fear, Feed Joy.

    A one minute audio blog of a native English speaker, spontaneous, unplanned, and bare bones.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email like this one to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Three …er… Seven Books

    Daily writing prompt
    List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
    View all responses

    I’m sitting here trying to narrow it down to three books. Because after all, what book that I’ve read hasn’t had an impact on me one way or the other? Isn’t that the point of reading? To be changed by it?

    I’m also sitting here thinking about choosing three books that will make me look cool, or smart, or “in the know”.

    And then I’m thinking about the three books I’m currently reading on paper, e-reading, and listening to.

    They are, in paper, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson. I always appreciate books that take apart the so-called accepted conventions of the academic world.

    On my e-reader: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Rendon. I’ve just started this, but Marcie Rendon is one of my favorite authors. Each time I’ve started a new book in her Cash Blackbear series, I feel as though I’m getting caught up with an old friend.

    And, finally, I’m listening to Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence. I’m just getting into this book. I’ve also been working more seriously on my language learning right now and this book is the perfect companion to this kind of work — providing motivation for putting in the time and effort to something that doesn’t necessarily feel immediately useful.

    Because certainly in this moment, those are the ones that have the greatest impact on me. Or perhaps it’s the last three that I completed?

    Which were, on my e-reader, the Dreamblood duo logy by NK Jemison. (This includes The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun.) I wrote about this book in a previous post about dreaming. I definitely will be re-reading these in hard copy form. I find reading books I can engage more deeply with the text than on an e-reader.

    In hardback book form: Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang. It’s a stunning memoir written in her mother’s voice. It made me a better parent and mother.

    This is from a few months back, but Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals really made an impact on me. Specifically, it helped me make sense of what it meant to be sick with breast cancer.

    OK. This is more than three books, but books happen to be something I’m excited about. Check out my early posts with more Book Recommendations. If I wrote about them, they impacted me in some way.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Starve Fear. Feed Joy. (A story/ prose poem sort of a thing.)

    Daily writing prompt
    What fears have you overcome and how?
    View all responses

    Fear is a hungry beast. I find it’s overly easy to feed its gaping maw. What do I mean by that? I mean that the society and culture that I live within is a veritable buffet of delights for fear to endlessly consume. Fear, in its turn, has a bottomless stomach and is always ready to grab a clean plate and begin its trip through the hot bar. And the cold one too.

    I’ll feed it unnecessary purchases of bits and bobs I’ve seen advertised as being able to make me happier, prettier, younger, even wealthier. Fear will consume them all. And I? No happier, no prettier, no younger and perhaps a little bit poorer. And still Fear’s belly rumbles with hunger, demanding ever more time, attention, quick fixes, superficial dalliances into this and that. “You’re missing out,” he whispers into my jewel-laden ear. And I succumb. And still he devours more.

    Fear holds my attention with its adrenaline and thrills, its glitter and shine, its shadows and mirrors. Caught up in the echantment of his own illusions, he pulls back a curtain to reveal his greatest weapon: death.

    But, alas, Fear has overplayed his hand. For Death reminds us, “I’ll meet all of you regardless of how you spend your time. You’d do just as well to invite Fear into your heart as you would with his twin, Joy. It’s all the same to me.”

    And so I pass Joy a clean plate from the buffet of earthly delights: a long stretch, a deep breath, the breeze shifting the juniper branches, a sip of clean water. And together we eat our fill. And then some.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?

    Daily writing prompt
    What jobs have you had?
    View all responses

    What’s in a job? Does there need to be payment?

    Cash, ducats, affections exchanged.

    Does there need to be an exchange of tangible goods?

    Care, food, health, love.

    I was once a secret keeper. I was terrible at that job. I didn’t know which ones should be kept and which ones thrown away, whispered and carried away on the wind, which ones to bind up in my heart and which to shout out.

    Needless to say, I’m a terrible judge of character.

    I also spent a summer smearing cream cheese on bagels. This was before there were tip jars on counters.

    My first paid job was babysitting. I probably wasn’t very good at this either. Sometimes, I suspect that parents confused “good at babysitting” with “available and cheap, relatively.” Oh, and a girl in roughly the right age range.

    I even convinced myself that perhaps I really had a gift, a purpose. And so I ended up a teacher for a while.

    I’ve been an assistant editor, a research assistant, a sandwich maker, a camp counselor, a guide for a group of teenagers traveling, a creator. Those are things that I’ve more or less gotten paid for.

    Is getting paid a requisite for a job?

    Because the job I’ve had the longest is a mother but I don’t get paid for that. I’m told it is its own reward.

    I don’t get paid for this either.

    Still, one must carry on. Job or no job. Paid or not. And so I do.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Practice. Practice. Practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are you good at?
    View all responses

    I’ve been thinking off and on about this question since I read it last night. And each time, when my mind has started to wander towards figuring out how I’m going to answer it when I eventually sit down at my computer, I’ve gently tugged it back to the present moment.

    Am I good at this gentle tugging? Maybe. But “good” is a relative term isn’t it? Certainly it’s something that I’m trying to practice regularly, this gentle tugging of my mind to the present moment. I don’t think that there’s a way to grade it or assess whether or not I’m “good” at it.

    But even here, now, I’m sitting at my computer answering this daily prompt. My mind will start to wander towards trying to guess at what I’m “supposed” to write. My mind will wonder, “What are other bloggers writing in response to this question?”

    Tug. Tug. Gently. Gently.

    I can feel the keys underneath my fingertips.

    Ah! The miracle that my muscles, sinew, neurons remember where to place each finger in order to get the desired result. How is it that I remember how to spell the words: memory, gentle, mind, and wander?

    I might consider for a moment going down a google rabbit hole to read the science behind this process of what I’m doing here.

    But, remember? Tug. Tug. Gently. Gently.

    My chair is uncomfortably out of alignment from my desk and screen. I rearrange myself. The chair squeaks.

    Gentle tug.

    I hear the car tires on the highway outside of my house; a flare of frustration at the speed everyone seems to be driving.

    Tug. Tug.

    I worry. Is this enough words? Did I answer the question? Will someone read this and feel or think something?

    Tug. Tug.

    My feet are resting lightly on the stack of blankets under my desk. I stretch my toes.

    I pull my mind back to my breath. Breathe.

    This. This is what I’m good at.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • “Having it all” means being present to myself…

    Daily writing prompt
    What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?
    View all responses

    … in each and every moment.

    Is it attainable? With a lot of work, absolutely.

    I feel as though I have a lot of distractions away from myself, a lot of competing demands, a lot of voices telling me what I should be doing, attaining, being, thinking, making, taking, giving, living, watching, fearing, hearing, seeing, feeling, having, owning, buying and all the rest of it. The work of it is learning to say no to those demands. And figuring out how to say yes to myself.

    For me, this has required a lot of grace extended towards myself. It has meant allowing myself to be who I am without judgement. I try to practice this presence to myself every day. I fail a lot.

    When I go for a walk. I try to just go for a walk. I pull myself back to myself again and again. This is hard for me to do because my mind is continually scanning for what might be coming next even on a walk around my own neighborhood.

    But I pull my attention back to myself again and again as I walk.

    The other day. I saw a bird in front of my house. It had something in its beak. Maybe it was going to take it back to build its nest.

    If I had not been in a mode of slowing down, I think I would have missed seeing that bird. And then I would not have had that bird in my mind as I sat down to write this post.

    If I had not slowed down to observe the bird, would the bird still exist? Would it still have built its nest if I hadn’t seen in? Probably.

    But I will never know.

    And so I’m glad that I slowed down, that I came back to myself to observe the bird, building its home. Now the bird lives in my head.

    And on this post.

    And this is what I mean by having it all.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Myself.

    Daily writing prompt
    Who would you like to talk to soon?
    View all responses

    I wrote last week about three books about dreams and dreaming and an experience I had with learning more about myself and creative problem solving through my dreams.

    I’ve been writing down my dreams when I remember them. From time to time, I’ll think about what I want to dream about and remind myself to try to write them down after I turn out the light and as I’m falling asleep.

    I’ve wanted to lucid dream and I’ve tried a few practices towards that goal. A few times a day, I checked in to ask myself, “am I dreaming?” The goal here is to prime my brain to ask myself that question in a dream state. I also read that one way that people lucid dream is that they prime their brains to recognize that they are in a dream. Things are often “off” in dreams and if we can recognize that things are not quite right, then we can recognize that we are in a dream and assume control of the dream. As for the things that are commonly off in dream (apparently, according to what I read) is that dreamers are in buildings that no longer exist, they are conversing with people who had already died, or their hands aren’t quite right — they might have too many fingers or not enough or they might just look a bit wrong. (Apparently, hands are so complex that we have a hard time recalling them in all of their detail.)

    I often dream of my childhood home, which has since been torn down. I thought that this was the perfect way to get myself into lucid dreaming. And I tried to prime my brain to remember that when I see that home, it’s not real and therefore must be a dream. Several mornings, when I wrote down my dreams from the night before, I described dreaming of my childhood home followed by the question, “Why didn’t I recognize that was a dream???” I was getting a bit frustrated.

    So I set aside all of that. I didn’t really set aside the “goal” of lucid dreaming but, rather, I decided to trust that my mind was doing what it needed to do whilst dreaming regardless of whether I remembered or not and regardless of whether or not I knew I was dreaming. I still was writing down dreams when I remembered them, but I wasn’t letting it bother me when I didn’t. I was confident that I was still dreaming. I was confident that my mind was still doing what it needed to do to take care of me regardless of whether or not I could put the experiences into language.

    In other words, I let go.

    This letting go, this distinct feeling of ungrasping, this trust in myself …. all of that is central to what happened to me next.

    Last night, I dreamt that I was in the driveway of my home. There was a lot going on. Different people visiting, all these cars parked all over the place, more people arriving with camping chairs. I was getting progressively annoyed by all of this. In the dream, I was talking to a few people. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t really matter who these people are in waking life. They are all dream representations of different parts of my personality or different things on my mind. I was talking to one person and suddenly I looked up at my house. We renovated our house a few years ago but in the dream, the house looked like it did PRE renovation.

    I started to say that to the person I was talking to, “look, my house looks….” and then I’m pretty sure I gasped in the dream. “That means I’m dreaming!” I said. Even though I was dreaming I still said “excuse me” to the person I was talking to and then I launched myself into the air and started to fly.

    Especially when I was younger, I’d often have flying dreams, but they involved a fair amount of effort. And I was often flying to get away from something threatening. In this dream, it was completely effortless and exhilarating. I wasn’t trying to escape. I was simply being.

    In fact, I think that I was SO excited that my excitement woke me up.

    Dreams in general feel like I am speaking to myself. I’m having conversations with different parts of myself often towards getting to know them all better and, as I mentioned before, often towards some sort of problem solving.

    Prior to this experience, I wasn’t even aware that I felt that part of me was unavailable to myself. I think that this is a very western freudian belief system — that we have a “deeper” self that is actually controlling us. In other words, this whole idea of repressing our true selves and feelings.

    I woke up realizing that this isn’t true. It was as if this dream dug out and released this false belief system that had been implanted in there by western “culture”.

    Last night, my lucid dream felt like a “break through” in the sense that I can talk to myself, my WHOLE self without words or language. I experienced a sense of wholeness in the lucid dream, a feeling that has carried over into my waking self.

    I am not a mystery to myself.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • On spoons and hurts; words and truth. (A Prose Poem sort of a thing.)

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you have any collections?
    View all responses

    I once knew someone who collected small decorative spoons. Apparently this was a thing that people did. Or maybe still do. At least, that’s what I was led to believe when I expressed my confusion when I learned of this spoon collection. Apparently, many places, or at least the places where this person had been, sell these spoons as souvenirs.

    I think perhaps they kept their spoons in a velvet-lined box. I’m actually not sure if they showed me such a box or if I just made that up. My understanding is that the spoons were not used for anything. They were just kept. Maybe this person and his family (I think the spoon collecting was something of a group project for them) pulled them out every so often to clean them and reminisce about where they had acquired each spoon. And maybe that is purpose enough. Maybe some objects spark memories, conversations even connection.

    Anyway I’ve never collected spoons.

    I do have horrible habit of collecting hurts. You know, things that have been said or done to me that have been unfair or mean. I squirrel them away in my heart and then every so often pull them out to shine them and examine them so that I learn their every shape and crag. That way I can place them in juuuust the right spot in this wall that I’m building. At least such a collection has a practical purpose. That wall is high and strong. I am safe inside where I can keep an even more useful collection: bits and pieces of information about myself, moments of solid happiness and contentment, bright and shiny truths.

    I collect words and sentences, compile them into their velvet boxes, maybe give them a good shake. What words and images will I pull out from my collection this time? Will they be true?

    Maybe they will inspire me to tap out a bit of mortar or even a whole rock from the wall of hurts. I’ll slip the words out through the hole. They’ll glisten and shimmer, a sort of flashlight morse code. I-M-H-E-R-E they will spell out. I’m here.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!